Taste: My Life Through Food

Tucci searches, throughout the book, not just for a taste of something delicious but a taste of something authentic. This is in keeping with his Italian roots—he seeks a connection to his cultural identity and his ideas about artistic expression. These positions are sometimes at odds with each other; there are rules that are sacrosanct, like the pairing of pasta shapes with particular sauces, and rules that can be bent, if not totally broken, by the exigencies of creative reinterpretation. What binds these two occasionally contradictory impulses together is that they stand against the overwhelming forces of capitalism—symbolized by America itself—that seek to homogenize and dilute cultural authenticity and creative endeavor. Thus, Tucci renders himself an iconoclast, someone who wants to make a “foreign film” as an American (Big Night), who wants to celebrate his ordinariness by emphasizing his exceptionality, and who seeks satisfaction in the simplicity of complex and contested culinary legacies.

After emphasizing his conventional childhood, growing up as a free-range kid in a middle-class family that occasionally had to pinch pennies, Tucci flips this narrative on its head to highlight what was different and exceptional about his family. Not only is his mother an “extraordinary” cook (1), but she is, comparatively speaking, “like [...] any great cook or chef” (13) who believes their food to be greater than the sum of its parts. The fact that she mostly cooks Italian food, supplemented by a rotation of other, mostly European-inspired dishes (and that she works full time), also distances her from the typical American housewife of the era. That is, Tucci’s mother is a chef; she does not simply cook to provide basic nourishment for her family: “Her cooking, like that of any great cook or chef, is proof that culinary creativity may be the most perfect art form. It allows for free personal expression like painting, musical composition, or writing and yet fulfills a most practical need” (13-14). This also serves to ally him with his mother—their afternoons together watching cooking shows is no coincidence—as an artist who cooks and acts.

When he later talks about the Italian tradition of pairing certain pasta with particular sauces, he gestures to a kind of authenticity that it would be metaphorically sacrilegious to defy: “The shape of the pasta is as important as the makeup and quality of its ingredients when it comes to the success of pairing it with the appropriate sauce; you might call it a divine coupling” (65). This excuses his need to experiment with gluten-free pastas (the shape is more important than the wheat). This discussion also leads him to untangle the historical origins of the quintessentially Italian sauce, ragù. After tracing its historical origins in Italy (and France), Tucci grapples with the Italian American experience: “Many Italian Americans call a meat-based ragù by the incredibly vague name of ‘red sauce’ or even ‘gravy’” (69). This is symbolic of the corruption of authenticity when it crosses oceans and gets diluted by the melting-pot mentality of America: “Their lack of specificity points to the homogenization of Italian cooking by Americans and second- and third-generation Italian Americans themselves” (69). While one could suggest that Italian American cuisine has become its own kind of authentic cooking over several generations, Tucci sees in America the homogenizing impulse—he will later rail against concerning specialty shops and old New York—that must be resisted. He provides the reader, instead, with a “a ragù recipe that was brought to America by my paternal grandfather’s family” from Calabria (69)—that is, the real deal rather than a mere gravy.

Finally, when talking about the making of his cult classic, Big Night—a movie in which food is the centerpiece—Tucci writes about his motivations: “I had always wanted to write a script that would be more in keeping with the tone and structure of a ‘foreign film.’ By this I mean a film that was primarily character driven, eschewed stereotypes, and ended somewhat ambiguously” (145). He also mentions the Danish film Babette’s Feast as a source of inspiration. This adheres to his narrative that Europe, rather than America, is the origin of authenticity and true artistic expression, whether through food or film. He sees Big Night as the achievement of a particular vision of what it means to be Italian in America:

It was a screenplay that dramatized the struggle between commerce and art, portrayed the Italian immigrant as someone unconnected with the Mafia [...], showed the importance of food in Italian culture and how it is often used to express emotions (150).

This antagonistic relationship between “commerce and art” rests at the heart of Tucci’s ideas about food, in general, and taste—as in personal discernment—in particular. The more capitalist imperatives are indulged, the less authentic the experience or the food; America symbolizes this homogenizing impulse: it turns the artistic expression of a chef into the mother who must cook to feed her children; it reduces the art of ragù into the slurry of gravy; and it contorts theatrical expression into commercial opportunity.